"Archaeologists suggest that the tank was likely visible in ancient times to allow access to the two stop keys, enabling the inhabitants to regulate the flow or shut off water distribution in order to carry out maintenance operations of the system."
In other words, valves!
The one less ideal thing is that it's made of lead of course.
OK, I read that over. It seems to be entirely estimates and "could be." No one's dug up a service line and said, "Yep, there's lead in that."
One GAO report says,
As we reported in 2017, based on the available data, the
majority of the 68,000 water systems subject to the Lead and Copper
Rule at the time of our review had not been required to replace lead
service lines and therefore were not required to conduct complete
inventories.
In other words, no one knows.
So while it's not false to say that "Lead pipes are still used in every US state" it's also not provably true. Right?
A good question would be, "why aren't they required to replace lead service lines?" This would be a health benefit beyond any possible doubt.
I’m not sure why you’re choosing to go down this line if faulty reasoning, but the consist of municipal service lines is not completely mysterious. There’s a difference between knowing the status of every pipe and knowing what the system is generally made up of.
My spouse was on the leadership team of a municipal water district. They knew at the block level where lead (or even wood & lead) service were likely to be, and had prioritized inventories of infrastructure like valves, etc that required replacement. They weren’t pioneers in this area, every water utility does this. As breaks were repaired or other ground work (sewer remediation, new storm drains, etc) they had a capital fund to make replacements. The main remaining place where lead is present is between the water main/service valve and people’s homes. That pipe is usually the financial responsibility of the homeowner, and it’s an expensive job - $5-15k.
The other factor is that the lead issue, like asbestos, is overblown. As long as the civil engineers responsible for the infrastructure aren’t bypassed by criminally negligent political leadership (aka what happened in Flint, MI), there’s no meaningful risk. If you’re using an untreated well, different story.
OP's reference said that many states don't provide estimates. You said
> There’s a difference between knowing the status of every pipe and knowing what the system is generally made up of.
So the states don't bother asking the cities, or refuse to aggregate and estimate it, or what?
Your last paragraph also doesn't jibe with the second. If it's the homeowners' responsibility, then where does the "criminally negligent political leadership" come in?
The OP is trying to link a general statement made by an advocacy group to a GAO audit. They have nothing to do with each other. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of the problem domain knows that any water installation before a certain date is a lead line. States and the EPA mandate and audit representative testing of public water supplies.
The criminal negligence in Flint was that, to save money, the state appointed leadership of the City water system knowingly obtained water from an alternate source whose water chemistry caused the lead pipes in Flint to leach out and expose people to the lead in the water. Had they treated the water appropriately, or not changed the water supply, the oxidation in the pipes would have prevented the leaching of lead into the water, as it had for a century.
Right, and more to the point, it's much easier to check tap water for the presence of lead than to inventory the entire water system (which is also worth doing).
> So while it's not false to say that "Lead pipes are still used in every US state" it's also not provably true. Right?
All you'd need to do to prove the statement is find one in-service lead pipe in each state. Not exactly a high bar. Not sure what the point of nitpicking this is?
Finding one in-service lead pipe in each state IS a pretty high bar.
A more rational approach would be to look at testing for lead levels in tap water, which we can assume probably does get done by the EPA and other agencies.
Stating that lead pipes are relatively widespread isn't hysteric. In most cases, lead pipes are harmless, although if the chemical composition of the water changes, that can lead to dangerous lead leaching (see Flint, MI).
I'm not saying it's not a problem but after a few minutes of research I think some context is useful.
The current source of lead seems mostly (maybe almost entirely?) from "lead service lines," which is the pipe between the street and the home. And, new installations of those lines has been illegal since 1986 in the US.
> new installations of those lines has been illegal since 1986 in the US
News to me. Do you have a citation for that?
In the San Jose area we get junk mail almost monthly imploring us to buy insurance against the cost of replacing our water lines, because of their age. So I would have assumed that they all get replaced every 50 years or so.
Copper is usually fine up to 75-100 years old, but a lot of houses have galvanized pipe, which rusts pretty severely over time. It’s not uncommon for them to rust almost closed within 25 years.
PVC can get brittle, and PE pipe has notorious problems with connectors corroding/failing.
A lot of older sewer lines are clay or cast iron, and they also crack or rust through.
Like wiring, eventually it makes sense to replace them.
Everyone who is serious about their health and has the means should be invested in reverse osmosis filtration at home with KDF and carbon pre-filtration even if you have "good" water.
Drinking huge volumes of water on the order of a gallon per day is important for general health and water is the main way most people ingest carcinogens due to sheer volume.
You absolutely don’t need to drink a gallon of water a day under all circumstances. You also certainly don’t need an RO filter in most places. Tap water can be a great source of some minerals, depending on location and a little fluoride is great for your teeth.
What carcinogens are you worried about in average tap water?
It does look like the valves themselves (with tube stubs) were vendor-supplied. Could be two different vendors at two different times.
Those look like modern forged tapered-stem stopcock valves, probably hand fabricated to arrive at a product not much different than a machine shop would make today.
The manifold/tank could have been made from hammered and welded sheet with end(s) somewhat removable for occasional maintenance. Looks like maybe places for a couple more taps to the right of the two that are in there now.
Like today, the plumbers were the ones who put the parts together and ran the pipes to the points-of-use.
I went to a museum in Italy and Roman plumbing was very modern looking. They had valves, t bends, taps, pressure nozzles etc. made of bronze or lead. Really did not expect that.
One of my precious teenage memories is visiting a friend whose parents had a good library and set of Roman bilingual writings (similar to the Loeb Classics series). I picked Pliny’s letters and read the entire thing in one gulp. I was blown away how modern the thoughts and problems and considerations were.
The thousand years of Darkness after the fall of the Roman Empire were no joke. If we all can contribute just a little bit to keep civilization thriving for centuries to come, we have done our part.
It's always worth remembering that Roman and Greek ideas (themselves partially built on Egyptian notions) in mathematics and science continued to be developed in North Africa, the Middle East and India during those 'thousand years of Darkness', and that store of knowledge was itself critical in turn to the following European explosion of knowledge beginning in the Renaissance. For example:
> "A 13th century observer claimed there were "5000" waterwheels along the Guadalquivir in Islamic Spain; even allowing for medieval exaggeration, irrigation systems were certainly extensive in the region at that time. The supply of water was sufficient for cities as well as agriculture: the Roman aqueduct network into the city of Cordoba was repaired in the Umayyad period, and extended."
It’s interesting that most people seem to forget or ignore the Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire for some reason. No state contributed more to preserving ancient knowledge and Constantinople was absolutely central to that. e.g. if it had fallen to the Arabs in the the late 600’s the dark ages would have been a lot darker an possibly would have never ended (e.g. the collapse of Roman-Hellenic civilization would have been a lot more similar to the bronze age collapse.
Also the downfall of the (Eastern) Roman Empire mostly coincided with the high middle ages and early renaissance. And contact with the empire arguably was much more important for kickstarting the renaissance than that with North Africa or the middle east.
The Byzantines sit in an uncomfortable middle for a modern intellectual. Too European to be exotic and "diverse" in the contemporary shallow meaning of the word, but at the same time too Orthodox to be culturally comprehensible to modern Westerners. Speaking an Indo-European language that is nevertheless very distant from all the current major Indo-European language groups and uses its own hard-to-read script.
Nevertheless the fraction among general intellectuals is todays negligible, and most current opinion makers wouldn't be able to say "Hello" in either language. This increases the civilizational distance significantly.
It used to be much higher; 100 years ago, both Greek and Latin were compulsory subjects in many schools.
Isn’t that period when Europe pulled ahead technologically in every way from antiquity? For example many civilizations pursued alchemy and why only in Europe did it turn into chemistry? Same with astrology into astronomy. Wind power, metallurgy, ship building, farming, stirrups (using the weight of the horse with the rider) with spears, cathedral building, the university system etc. The eastern empire thrived until the Ottomans overthrew in the 14th. It has to do with reason and progress and the systems that drove those. I think a larger part was the translation from Greek to latin between 1125-1200.
Europe pulled ahead technologically in every way from antiquity only after 1500, i.e. after the introduction of the movable-type printing press (whose first effect was that most writings preserved from antiquity became easily accessible for a large number of people, constituting a base for the later scientific and technical progresses) and after the discovery of the maritime ways to Asia and America.
The transition from alchemy and astrology to chemistry and astronomy and the improvements in metallurgy happened later. The improvements in ship building had begun a little earlier, but the greatest progress was mostly later.
Only the progresses in cathedral building had already happened many centuries earlier and the progress in firearms a couple of centuries earlier.
In my opinion, the answer to the question "Why only in Europe did alchemy turn into chemistry?" is because only in Europe the printed books were available for making known to everybody the earlier alchemical works (e.g. by translations from Arabic) and then the progresses in alchemical experiments, until the 18th century during which the modern chemistry was created by the interchange of information between Swedish, French, British, German, Spanish etc. chemists.
Without such an international network of scientists who were able to read very soon the printed results of the chemical research performed by their colleagues from other countries and then they could devise improved experiments for chemical investigations, the modern chemistry could not be created.
If, instead of publishing immediately the results of their experiments, the 18th century chemists would have kept them secret, like most of the early alchemists, the modern chemistry could not have appeared.
Well, Isaac Newton was also a dedicated alchemist who spent some time and energy on a search for the philosopher's stone (which in no way denigrates his other work on gravity, calculus, optics, etc.). That was pretty common thinking up through the late 18th century, when people like Lavoisier and Priestly revolutionized everything via careful quantitative measurements (and open publication, i.e. not keeping their work secret).
Again, this was an area where Islamic civilization preservend and advanced on Roman-Greek knowledge during the European Dark Ages. There's also some interesting history regarding the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who apparently made a determined effort to wipe out the alchemists in the Empire because he believed they'd actually managed to make gold, and feared debasement of the currency or the funding of rebel armies.
The eastern empire was essentially destroyed by Venice in 1204. While they regained Constatinolpe, some territory in the Balkans and Anatolia, the empire never truly recovered. During the last 250 years of its existence it was a mere shadow of its former self. It never regained its status as the preeminent cultural and political power in the Christian world.
> stirrups (using the weight of the horse with the rider) with spears
Stirrups are not a European innovation but borrowed, probably from Asian invaders, and spread across Asia to Europe from China beginning in the late 6th century AD. China and Korea had stirrups for almost a millennia by then.
I experienced the exact same thing reading Cicero’s letters. If you’d told me he had chronic anxiety and spent far too long on Twitter I’d have half believed you.
"Thousand years of darkness" represents a view of the Middle Age that was widespread among historians of the past, most famous Edward Gibbon and his: "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (1776-1789), but is seen in a much more differentiated way today. For a recent introduction into the debate of the "fall" of Rome (in the West) see Bret Devereaux's three part series "Rome: Decline and Fall?"[1] In his conclusions at the end of the series Devereaux states:
"The ‘nitwit’ of our duel – the notion that the Middle Ages was some general collapse of ‘progress’ which delayed the course of human development – doesn’t accord with the evidence. The popular perception is that many Roman technologies were lost, but in fact these were fairly few, the most notable being Roman concrete. As noted, what is remarkable about Greek and Roman literature and learning is not how much of it was lost, but how much of it survives to the present. Moreover, the Roman economy was not the durable foundation for a lost early industrial revolution; instead it was a delicate clockwork mechanism which could, for a time, haul itself modestly – and only modestly – above pre-modern agrarian norms. When the gears broke, the clockwork stopped and it fell back down.
At the same time, ‘falling back down’ is not the only story of the Middle Ages. I cannot stress this enough, the European Middle Ages were not a stagnant time in Europe or anywhere else. Older scholars, like Rostovtzeff and Gibbon supposed that Europe only reached a Roman level of prosperity in the early modern period, perhaps in the 1500s or 1600s, reasoning from the grandeur of Roman buildings and literature. But a fair look at the economic and demographic history suggests, I think, quite clearly that the ‘crossover’ point is much earlier, well into the Middle Ages. My own rough estimate would be generally around 1100 in most places; state capacity remains lower for longer because the states of Europe were small and fragmented, but one can argue that was a good thing for their long-term development. Moreover, not everything between 476 and 1100 was just ‘recovery’ – some things were new! Speaking of my own expertise, medieval steel-making, especially at its upper end, tends to be quite a bit better than Roman steel-making. Water-mills (which the Romans had) and windmills (which they didn’t) were, by 1100 apparently far more common in Europe than they had been under the Romans.
The collapse of Roman political authority doesn’t represent any sort of clear break in anything we might call ‘Roman civilization’ [...] Latin persisted; Christianity persisted; Roman literature persisted; Roman law persisted; the Roman Empire itself persisted in the East. The claims of Frankish and Gothic kings to be heirs to the legacy of Rome was not an empty one from a cultural standpoint – if Gallo-Romans or Greek-speaking Eastern Romans could be heirs of Rome, why not Latin-speaking Franko-Romans?
At the same time, what we might call the ‘strong’ form of the ‘change and continuity’ position – that essentially nothing of value was lost as the Roman Empire crumbled in the west – doesn’t seem sustainable in light of the evidence either. [...] it is quite clear that, on the one hand, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West represented a substantial decline in state capacity [...]
At the same time, it seems fairly clear from the evidence that the collapse of Roman connectedness took a slow economic decline and turned it into a collapse. [...] my focus is drawn to the living conditions of the people in a society. From that perspective, the fall of Rome was an unmitigated disaster, a clear (but not total) break with the economic patterns of antiquity which had enabled a measure of prosperity in the Mediterranean world."
while you list some interesting quotes, I'm not sure what us the point you are trying to make. That there was no decline? but your last quote says there clearly was a decline.
to me as a layman, it's very impressive to look at the Pantheon and to realize that the next structure of such massive complexity would only be built a 1000ish years after it. Sure, some things have been invented in that period, but the next "wow" would be probably Santa Maria del Fiore, and after that (pick one for your taste). (With a notable exception of Hagia Sophia, since the Second Rome has never been considered "European enough", as aptly observed by the commenter above)
That’s a modern perception though. The Byzantine Empire was considered to be the centre of Christendom will into the Crusade period.
> that the next structure of such massive complexity would only be built a 1000ish years after it.
Climate change and plague were the primary reasons why urban populations collapsed. Even if little technology was lost (not necessarily true) there was simply no need or resources to build a new monumental structures throughout Europe when you could have just reused the buildings constructed by the Romans.
Not after the Great Schism which happened before the crusades and the East started getting treated as pretty much an alien or even an enemy culture, and certainly not after the backstabbing of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when the West damn near killed that culture. And in any case, the Byzantine doesn't seem to have nearly the impact of the Renaissance or other Western inventions of the second millennium, even before the Great Schism, or at any point in its existence. For better or worse.
> little technology was lost
Maybe. Again, from strictly a layperson's non-historian perspective, I find the most amazing things being built and invented mostly post 1300's (and before 400-ish), and not much to write home about in between. But maybe it's just me.
The great schism wasn't that great at the time. There were multiple schism before it and after it. And contemporary historians didn’t really see it as some permanent irreconcilable split between the eastern and western Church. They hardly even mentioned it.
It’s a bit like the fall of the Western Roman empire. Seems like a huge event for us but people living at the time hardly noticed it. The Latin and Greek/Orthodox churches were drifting apart for centuries prior to the “schism” and continued doing so afterwards but its significance wasn’t that clear at the time.
At the beginning of the first Crusade the Emperor was still seen as the universal/supreme ruler of the Christian world (at least in theory) and recognized as such both by the church and most European monarchs.
> And in any case, the Byzantine doesn't seem to have nearly the impact of the Renaissance or other Western inventions of the second millennium, even before the Great Schism, or at any point in its existence. For better or worse
That’s debatable. I agree that relatively little innovation occurred but most ancient knowledge was primary preserved in Byzantium. It’s possibly that the Renaissance would not have occurred had the Roman empire fallen during the dark ages. Arguably it began in the Byzantine empire during the 12 and 13th centuries and just shifted to Italy in the later centuries. Italy was socially, economically and culturally interlinked with the empire and Italian humanism is pretty clearly inspired by Byzantine humanism which preceded it.
> of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when the West damn near killed that culture
True. But the west wasn’t exactly homogenous either. Besides religious matters there was no clear boundary between Byzantium and the Latin world. Arguably most of Italy had more in common with the Empire than with the Germans. Venice was basically an offshoot of the Byzantine world. It was closer to the empire socially and culturally than to any place outside of the Italian peninsula. Of course to most French and German crusaders it seemed like a fairly alien place, but they probably feel similarly in Venice or Naples.
well, both the Germans and the people of North Italy were a part of the same empire at the time - that's from a formal standpoint - but more importantly, the popes were tightening the one-man grip on things ever since they crowned Charlemagne, so I still have a feeling that none of those people held Constantinople in particularly high regard. Venice being somewhat of an exception, but they also happily participated in the looting.
True it depends on the exact period we are talking about. The situation was pretty different in ~1000AD and in 1200. By the later period Constantinople’s influence in the west was waning or even non-existant.
e.g. by during the first Crusade there was a clear expectation that the Emperor will be the one in charge and will lead the crusaders to the holy land. It was basically a relief expedition organized to help the Empire defend itself from the Turks. There was clear cooperation between the pope and the empire. While cultural and linguistic differences were obvious to everyone there was no clear animosity (e.g. a loose modern analogy would be the relationship between Europe/EU and America)
Obviously it didn’t exactly turn out the way the Pope, Emperor and most of the crusaders expected. The subsequent Crusades were very different in this regard. And 12th seems to be around the time when the political split between the papacy, the latin world and the empire became permanent.
> And 12th seems to be around the time when the political split between the papacy, the latin world and the empire became permanent.
And even that is an insight from retrospect. During the following centuries there were several attempts to overcome the Great Schism. Due to the political decline of the East at that times, the agreements more or less reflected to positions of the West, most notably an agreement (culminating in the papal bull "Laetentur Caeli: Bulla Unionis Graecorum", 6 July 1439) reached during the Council of Florence (starting at 1431), that would have ended the schism, but met with fierce resistance in the years that followed from important groups in the East (such as the monsk of Mount Athos and the population of Constantinopel).[1] The fate of the agreement was still somewhat open when Constantinopel fell to the Ottomans in 1453.
I think that the effort to unite the churches might have become stronger in the 15th century because the Empire was no longer a real political and economic rival to Italian merchant republic, Sicily and the rest of the Latin world. It was obvious to everyone in Byzantium that they have no chance of resisting the Turks on their own which made them much more amenable to potential compromise with the church of Rome.
The situation was pretty different in 1200, the Empire was in a much stronger position and due to the conflicts with Italian merchant states and the Massacre of the Latins of the Latins just a decade earlier the relations between Constantinople were extremely poor. But yes, even then most probably did not consider the Latin and Greek churches to be fully separate and distinct entities (i.e. the schism was likely closer to the Western Schism of 1378 than to the reformation in how most people perceived it at the time)
Abandoned houses in modern society get stripped of copper so imagine how rare this is, and how much we've lost. But thanks to that good old volcano we actually already knew the Romans had lead taps and water pipes.
The fascinating thing about the Roman world is that they did so many thing so well, and that those things were done by a very small number of smart people. Rome over time produced a surprisingly large number of those people.
I suspect one main reason is they had documentation.
As an example, one of my favorites is reading the water system survey this guy did when he got stuck with the job:
I mean, that's fucking good documentation. Sure it took 400 years before someone wrote it down, but he was also reading through existing docs for a lot of this.
Surely it isn't a tank (it would make no sense to have a small, 5 or 10 liters or so tank), but it is also not a hammer arrestor, as it is not vertical, and there is no way it could provide the air cushion needed.
Very likely it is simply a sort of distribution manifold.
Oww, come on, there is no way it could have been vertical, and even if it was, it would be way too short, given the diameter, to allow for a meaningful air cushion.
Besides, in actual hammer arrestors both inlet and outlets would have been at the very bottom.
"Archaeologists suggest that the tank was likely visible in ancient times to allow access to the two stop keys, enabling the inhabitants to regulate the flow or shut off water distribution in order to carry out maintenance operations of the system."
In other words, valves!
The one less ideal thing is that it's made of lead of course.